Forest skulls may tell where 30,000 Stalin victims lie

By Ben Aris in St Petersburg

12:01AM BST 26 Sep 2002

More than 60 years after the bloodiest purges of Stalin's rule, Russian human rights campaigners are digging into their country's past, uncovering evidence which may at last prove what local people have long believed - that a forest outside St Petersburg is an enormous mass grave.

A group called Memorial began the search six years ago after research suggested that a three-mile square of forest near the Rzhevsky artillery range was the likeliest site for a mass grave.

It is thought that the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, may have killed as many as 30,000 people, including thousands of children, and buried them in unmarked pits near the town of Toksovo, 20 miles north of St Petersburg.

More than 50 shallow graves containing human remains have been uncovered so far. Twenty skulls have been dug up, most with a single hole at the back.

"Nearly all the skulls have a bullet hole in the back of the head which matches the .45 calibre of military issue pistols of Stalin's era," said Irina Flige, the director of Memorial's historical research department.

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Records show that more than 60,000 residents of St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, where shot during the Stalin years - 40,000 in the 1937-38 purges alone. But it has remained a mystery where the the victims were buried.

Only one cemetery in St Petersburg is known to contain a few thousand victims who were shot in prison, but the bodies of the rest have never been accounted for.

Memorial has decided not to exhume the bodies as it is still petitioning the FSB, the successor to the NVKD which later became the KGB, to admit that the remains are Stalin's victims.

"The FSB have denied that mass executions were carried out here and denied that there is any information in their archives that could prove otherwise. The FSB still identify with the NVKD and still refer to themselves as Chekisti," said Mrs Flige in a reference to a Russian nickname for secret policemen.

The discovery of the mass grave has awakened painful memories for families of the victims.

Irina Bulat was two when her father, a university professor, was shot in 1937. Two years later her mother was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in the Far East labour camps of Magadan.

"They came one night and arrested my father. He was in prison for six months then a commission of five men arrived one day from Moscow and after a 20-minute hearing sentenced him to death. He was shot the same day," said Mrs Bulat.

Her life was then plunged into chaos as she was moved from her parents' home to an orphanage for the children of "enemies of the people".

Her mother survived but they were not reunited until 1955, when Stalin's victims were rehabilitated and they were given a one-room apartment in Leningrad.

Mrs Bulat was never sure what had happened to their father. She was told by the FSB that he had been shot on June 30, 1937, as a "brigadier general of a terrorist organisation" planning to assassinate Stalin but "place of execution not known".

Memorial and Mrs Bulat are convinced that her father is one of the victims in the Rzhevsky mass grave. She said that in her father's academic resident block, where she was born, every family on every floor ended up either being shot or sent to the gulags.

Memorial plans to bring in experts to confirm how the victims were killed and has approached the FSB asking for the land, which belongs to the Defence Ministry, to be designated a memorial site.